


The Case Of Too Many Holmeses

by asparagusmama



Category: Doctor Who: Virgin New Adventures - Various Authors, Elementary (TV), Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes (1984 TV), Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Discoveries, Family History, Family Secrets, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-04
Updated: 2017-03-04
Packaged: 2018-09-28 04:22:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10071281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asparagusmama/pseuds/asparagusmama
Summary: Unable to sleep Watson makes a discovery on the internet in the early hours and Holmes explains a little about his extended family and family history over tea.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BabyKlingon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BabyKlingon/gifts).



> There is a reference below that is taken from the DW:VNA 'The Case of the All-Consuming Fire' by Andy Lane rather than from the ACD canon or any TV spin off.
> 
> For BK with love x

Joan couldn’t sleep. Everything she was learning about her friend and former client kept running through her mind, everything new she had learnt over the years. She reached for her laptop and ideally began to Google...

*

Sherlock Holmes was trying and failing to meditate, apparently many addicts found it useful to keeping them sober, however he was finding it boring and was twitchy. They badly needed a case to distract him. He had heard Joan get up and wondered whether to go talk to her, but it was 3am and she had obviously merely got up to go to the bathroom.

Or make some tea; he changed his deduction as he heard the stair creak. Perhaps he’d go join her in the kitchen. 

But there was no need, the door banged open and Joan stormed in, looking angry, dressed in short pyjamas with Hello Kitty emblazoned upon them covered with a crochet cardigan, carrying her laptop and looking particularly angry.

“I thought you were Scotland Yard’s consultant detective...?”

“Well, I was, as you know...”

“And Sherlock Holmes?”

“That, as you know, I am. I am he. Sherlock Holmes. What on earth...oh.” Joan had thrust her laptop under his nose. On it was a picture of a man wearing a ridiculous old-fashioned tweedy country hat, a deerstalker he believed they were called. The man as thin and tall, with curling dark hair, and following on behind him was a mousy short man of military bearing. They were going down the steps of a typical mid Victorian London terrace. ‘Sherlock Holmes bails out the Met yet again!’ screamed the typically British tabloid headline.

“So, who is that?” Joan demanded. “Do you have an impostor?”

“No. That is indeed Sherlock Holmes too. Seems like he’s interested in deductive reasoning, although I’m sure his monstrous ego and bad manners would get in the way.”

“I hate to break it to you Holmes, but you can be rude, you know? So, you know him?”

“Yes, I am rude, but mostly due to my lacking in social graces and skills and also to do with prioritising my reasoning and thought processes to better solve a case and to remain sober. He – he’s my cousin by the way, my younger cousin – is downright obnoxious and spoilt and deliberately rude for affect. I believe he gets pleasure from hurting people. If I hurt people it is an accidental side effect.”

Joan took the laptop back and put it down. “I need to know more. Your cousin? Morland Holmes has a brother? I need some tea too.”

“Good idea. Kitchen? It’ll be warmer.”

After a few minutes they were busy in the kitchen making their teas. “So?” Joan prompted.

“My father’s younger brother, my uncle, is something of a black sheep, in that money never interested him. He studied physics and higher maths at Cambridge, where he met his hippie scientist wife. They too had two sons and gave them the family names. My father barely acknowledges their existence. I’ve met them, perhaps twenty times in my childhood and teens. We were alike as chalk and cheese, as the saying goes. Home educated – you would say homeschooled – quite brilliant but undisciplined. He too has an elder brother called Mycroft, who had apparently risen above his different and difficult background to be something high up in MI5. Or is it MI6?”

“A spy?”

“A spy does not necessarily mean field work or action you know. He’s something in an office. He perhaps is The Office. Who knows? Maybe even behind the employment of his cousin and namesake. I try to pretend I don’t have a father and a brother most of the time, much less an extended family. From the look of the article, he courts publicity and attention. Doesn’t surprise me, he was an odd boy. Wouldn’t surprise me if he were a sociopath.”

“The other man is a Dr. John Watson. Isn’t that just too weird? Is he copying you?”

Holmes shrugged. “Watson is a common name. No doubt it’s a coincidence. How do you know, he wasn’t named in the newspaper online piece.”

“I followed links. He has an online blog.”

“Did you not, at one time, consider such a thing?” Holmes pointed out as he sat down at the table.

“I considered a private journal. Not the same.” Joan sat down and sipped her tea.

They sat in silence for a while, and then Joan spoke again. “Sherlock. Mycroft. Morland. Odd family names really, even for the English aristocracy.”

“What makes you think I’m aristocracy?”

“Aren’t you?”

Holmes looked directly at Joan for a moment, then looked away and drank his tea. “They go back to the original Holmes, from the early nineteenth century. Siger Holmes, the explorer. He had three sons, Sherringford, Mycroft and Sherlock. Something strange happened and the family buried what happened to Sherringford in the 1880s. Mycroft was also in the fledging secret service. The Great Game they called it back then, in typical public school British Empire arrogance and immaturity. But he did more too. He was the government, so my great grandmother’s diaries describe him. Sherlock was the original deductive consulting detective. Everything we take for granted he experimented and improved upon if not actually invented. It took him decades to get police services to use his methods. He was a very private man, so nothing survives but the fictional accounts of his roommate and friend, also a doctor. I found the accounts and diaries of both the doctor – another Watson, would you believe – and my great grandmother, their younger sister – one rainy, long summer hols hiding from my brother. I was about seven, I think. Before certain things like school happened.”

From the slight shake of the voice and the look in his eyes Joan sensed they were straying into very painful territory, a potential trigger. Although she had long since stopped being Holmes’ sober companion, she was his friend, so she changed the subject to her own brother’s latest thing that had annoyed her mother. He was obviously bored by it, but at least it gave him a legitimate outlet to rant about families. He was right; his was very strange indeed.


End file.
